And They Put Handcuffs on the Flowers

The inmates are both employees and asylum management in Fernando Arrabal’s hallucinogenic prison tragedy. And in this environmentally tricked-out new clusterfuck staging, the inmates are even—to cringing effect—the ushers. In fact, audacious director Nathan Robbel staples on so much pregame prison-dungeon hoo-ha as the audience enters the tarp-draped chamber in which the play is performed, even the adventurous, discerning playgoers the show hopes to attract will be justly suspicious of this ultimately bracing experiment from the get-go. (The town is Chicago and the month is February; not wanting to remove one’s shoes before entering the theater doesn’t make a person square.)

The raw extremes to which Right Brain Project reaches to illustrate the squalor, delirium and governing injustice of human incarceration are frankly outré and will startle and upset some viewers to the point that they can’t appreciate the trippy narrative. (This 1969 work was inspired by human-rights conditions in Franco’s Spain.) Even in our newly liberated, post-puritanical age, we feel obligated to warn audiences that they will be trapped in a small room with writhing actors who’ll play several scenes naked, reenact torture and frolic with scatology in ways that only our most creative readers might imagine.

Still, this grotesque spectacle in miniature is in many ways a smaller but ballsier and more confidently acted companion piece to last year’s monstrous Henry Darger installation play As Told by the Vivian Girls. It’s also daring, hand-crafted political theater whose fragmented, puzzle-piece scenes of domestic pathos and loose story line about a doomed rebel curiously echo Waiting for Lefty (although Handcuffs, sadly, isn’t as short). Anthony Ingraham’s spectral handheld-flashlight design deserves a special shout-out, while the ratty-haired-crazy-girl-clings-to-your-arm-and-whispers-terrors-into-your-ear while-escorting-you-to-your-seat house-management policy bears serious reconsideration.

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